Communist Party of Australia

The Communist Party of Australia (CPA) is a communist political party in Australia that was founded in October 1920. The CPA was co-founded by Jock Garden and Adela Pankhurst (the daughter of famed suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst), and most of its members were trade unionists and members of the banned Industrial Workers of the World. In 1926, the party's poor electoral results led to Garden returning to the Australian Labor Party, and the Comintern would later impose a new leadership on the party after it failed to comply with Moscow's directives. For 30 years, the Moscow-imposed party leadershp led the party, which began to win positions in unions such as the Miners Federation and the Waterside Workers Federation, although its candidates nearly always polled poorly at elections. In the early years of World War II, the party opposed Australian involvement in the war witn Nazi Germany, but after Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the CPA supported the war against fascism. In 1951, Robert Menzies' Liberal Party of Australia government attempted to ban the CPA, but he was narrowly defeated. Communist influence in trade unions remained potent, but the party's membership was only at around 5,000 people during the 1960s. In 1991, the original party dissolved, but a splintergroup of the party, formed in 1971 under the same name, continued to exist.